Project % · Island

On 17 August 2021 Che-Yu Wu made Island Impression as a daily piece, a pixel-built island. Mashbean saw it and asked him whether it could become a charitable NFT. In 2021 the two started FAB DAO together, with Mashbean leading; in a livestream the next year Che-Yu Wu described his own part as coming in “more as an artist, and by bringing in resources”.

In a livestream on 4 December 2021 he said in public that the island-and-mountains piece would be reworked into a hundred mountains of Taiwan. The project ran from January 2022 until the release; “at the start it was just one person”, he said, and then came Yi-Wen Lin in London, Lien-Cheng Wang teaching at Taipei National University of the Arts, Jinyao Lin teaching at Tainan National University of the Arts, and Aluan Wang. Che-Yu Wu was living in New York at the time.

Each of the five artists wrote one upright mountain, each in a style of their own: Che-Yu Wu’s Island is illustrated ridges and mist; Yi-Wen Lin’s Prairie a flowing grassland; Lien-Cheng Wang’s Traces close to an ink landscape, with a red seal in the lower right; Jinyao Lin’s Arcanum a ridge built up dot by dot on black; Aluan Wang’s Summit something like a print, with bands of colour, hatching, birds and trees. In the livestream Che-Yu Wu called his the leftmost range.

Newyellow’s framework joins the five works. Each one, once drawn, reports the height of its ridge at the left and right edges, and the collage page shifts neighbouring works up or down until the five mountains run on as one ridgeline. A box at 0.125 ETH held one token by each of the five artists; a single token cost 0.025 ETH. The framework also passes values between the works: Aluan Wang’s and Lien-Cheng Wang’s code read the values sent by the other series and change their own pictures, while Island only reports its own ridge and is not changed by the others.

The other four works take a while to render in the browser; by his account in the livestream, Jinyao Lin’s takes half an hour to an hour each time. Che-Yu Wu set himself the problem of real time. In a livestream on 11 August 2022 he said: “My goal is to make it appear in an instant.”

He first draws lines and blocks of colour on a p5.js canvas, then hands the whole canvas to a fragment shader as a texture, warping the coordinates before each sample is taken. Three kinds of warping are stacked. High-frequency noise breaks the edges into pixel-sized grain, like crayon or pastel; a fine warp that only pushes up and down makes vertical strokes; a slow, large warp makes the outlines heave and drift over time. The three layers are then added back onto themselves, which brightens and saturates the colour. Most of what looks like a gradient in the picture is really blocks of colour smudged apart.

The sky is a stack of ten-pixel bands from top to bottom. Fans of slanting lines spread from the peaks and a row of level lines sits behind them; after the shader, the level lines become cloud. In the same livestream he said: “I think the part I like most is the clouds.”

This is the third version. The first was written in a livestream on 17 March 2022: Perlin noise draws one new ridge per frame while the canvas scrolls down, so the mountain never stays still. Black Moon, in May, brought in the shader, but with the warp running in the wrong direction. Seeing how finely the other artists had worked, he scrapped it all and rebuilt it five to seven days before launch. The references he named are Matt DesLauriers’s Subscapes and Meridian on Art Blocks, which draw the light and shadow of strata with lines of different lengths and dots of different densities.

The composition of each token is fixed by the hash of the transaction that minted it and by its number; the two are turned into random numbers that replace p5.js’s random(), so a token’s ridges, colours and traits never change. A few constants inside the shader are drawn at random each time the page loads, so the fine grain of the strokes differs slightly every time it is opened.

There is no fixed palette: the sky and mountain colours of each token are mixed from six random numbers. Five traits are written on chain: sun or moon, the number of birds, whether there is a rainbow, the spacing between ridgelines, and whether it is black and white.

The hashes, traits and recomputed pictures of all 569 are kept in the database of the 569 tokens, filterable by trait. The minted code is self-hosted at island.art.cheyuwu.com; with a four-digit number and a hash, any one of them opens, and the mouse raises its sun.

From 7 to 11 September 2022 the project was shown in the theme exhibition STUDIO(dys)TOPIA at Ars Electronica in Linz, at Kepler’s Gardens on the campus of Johannes Kepler University; the festival theme that year was Welcome to Planet B. Ars Electronica and the Taiwan Creative Content Agency co-commissioned the work, curated by Yen-Lin Huang (Mashbean).

The installation was five upright screens and a black information board. In the photographs from the site the five screens sometimes play the same series at once and sometimes one mountain each. On the afternoon of 10 September, Lien-Cheng Wang, Aluan Wang and Jinyao Lin gave a thirty-minute audiovisual performance with the ridgelines of the project in Deep Space 8K at the Ars Electronica Center.

From 3 to 13 November the project was shown again, at the invitation of the Taiwan Creative Content Agency, in the Future Content exhibition of the Taiwan Creative Content Fest at Songshan Cultural and Creative Park in Taipei, in a section called Future Dreams Processing. Upright screens of different sizes, some provided by Innolux, lined the wall and the plinths; on the tablet introducing the artists, his card read “① / 5 Island”. He was there on 4, 12 and 13 November.

He has taken the mountains out three times since. In October 2023, in his solo exhibition The Great Equation at AMBI SPACE ONE in Taipei 101, the second scene of the chapter on life was the ranges of Project %. The scene was rebuilt in TouchDesigner, nine layers of mountains, a sky and birds, with the height of the sun wired to a MIDI control signal; in the audio guide he said the music changes in real time as the sun rises.

On the evening of 29 June 2024 PTS held the premiere of Sacred Forest on the National Theater and Concert Hall Plaza. The evening opened with OneSong Orchestra playing Lee Che-Yi’s arrangement of “Song of Alishan”, and the big screen showed ranges rewritten from Project %. In his notes to PTS he called the piece Island Impressions: Poems of the Mountains and said it extended the Hundred Peaks project. This version handed the position of the sun to a Leap Motion hand sensor. Standing at stage left, he raised his palm and the sun rose over the ranges.

In autumn 2024 he turned the minted code into a recording build and recorded a vertical film of 25 minutes 11 seconds at 2160 × 3840, in which a violet sky with a crescent moon gives way to red sunsets and yellow sunrises. The work, Algorithmic Verses: Island Impressions – Poems of the Hundred Peaks, was set in an AUO FindARTs 32-inch upright display in a wooden frame, in an edition of two. From 24 to 28 October 2024 it hung on the AUO booth S06 at ART TAIPEI, at the Taipei World Trade Center, and one edition was collected during the fair.

By October 2026 neither the project site project.fab.tw nor the token service that held the thumbnails and live pages could be reached, and the thumbnails and live pages of all 2,845 tokens could not be opened; what remains is OpenSea’s cache and a backup on GitHub. The pictures on this page, and every one of the 569 Island tokens in the database, were computed again from the minted code in that backup and the hashes on chain.